The Whitman Massacre

You are a few miles west of the site where one of the most consequential killings in Pacific Northwest history took place. On November twenty-ninth, eighteen forty-seven, a group of Cayuse warriors attacked the Waiilatpu Mission, killing thirteen people and triggering a chain of events that would reshape the entire Oregon Country.

Marcus and Narcissa Whitman had arrived here in eighteen thirty-six, among the first Protestant missionaries to reach what is now Washington state. Narcissa was one of the first two white American women to cross the Rocky Mountains overland. They set up a mission on Cayuse land near the Walla Walla River and watched the Oregon Trail pour thousands of emigrants through their yard each summer, many of them sick.

In eighteen forty-seven, a measles epidemic swept through the region and killed roughly half the Cayuse population. The death rate among white emigrants was far lower, partly because many adults had some childhood immunity. Cayuse tradition held that if a healer's patient died, the healer could be killed. Some Cayuse came to believe Marcus Whitman was deliberately poisoning their people rather than healing them. On that November morning, a group attacked the mission compound. Marcus and Narcissa Whitman were killed along with twelve others. Fifty-four people were taken captive, most of them children, and forty-nine survived to be released. Hudson's Bay Company factor Peter Skene Ogden negotiated their release the following month for blankets, shirts, and tobacco.

The killings did not end there. Oregon settler Joe Meek rode to Washington City in the dead of winter, arriving in May of eighteen forty-eight, to beg Congress for military protection. Within months, Congress organized the Oregon Territory, the first formal American government in the region. The Cayuse War that followed lasted nearly two years. In eighteen fifty, five Cayuse men were convicted of the killings and hanged at Oregon City. Whether all five were actually present at the mission that day remains disputed.

The site is now Whitman Mission National Historic Site, a few miles west on US Twelve. A low hill marks where the mission stood.